Britain helped stamp out slavery once – now Theresa May is trying to do the
same again

Today is the United Nations’ chosen day of remembrance for the slave trade and its abolition. It will be commemorated, as usual, in the old docks of Liverpool and Greenwich. Education packs have been prepared, telling schoolchildren about Britain’s complicity in this vile trade. There will not be much about how slavery was a worldwide institution that lay virtually unchallenged until British campaigners started kicking up a fuss in the 1780s, passed an historic law and then dispatched the Royal Navy to stamp it out. What we did wrong is somehow remembered far more clearly than what we then put right.

Normally, a government minister takes part in today’s ceremonies. But this year, there are no such plans. Instead, Theresa May is busy with something far more important. The Home Secretary’s concern is that the slave trade was not really abolished; it just changed its form. People are still bought and sold in coffee bars at Heathrow airport, then sent to work in Norwich farms and Soho nail bars. This modern slavery flourishes in Britain precisely because we regard it as an evil that was extinguished two centuries ago. Its victims are invisible, because no one is really looking – and they certainly don’t recognise it when they come across it.

Now and again, we see examples. When the horsemeat scandal erupted six months ago, I complained on these page that no similar fuss is made when modern-day slaves are found to be working in the supply chains that provide that food, or the rest of the stuff we buy. Why, I asked, doesn’t David Cameron seem to have much of an interest?

I spoke too soon. The Prime Minister has now agreed to pass a Modern Day Slavery Bill, which aims to extinguish today’s slave trade as surely as William Wilberforce’s Bill extinguished the old one. Its premise is that the Tories, who led that fight two centuries ago, have some unfinished business.

The picture of slavery in modern Britain exists in fragments, scattered around the news pages, so horrific and anachronistic that you can barely discern a pattern. The first problem is terminological. If Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson had spent the 1780s mumbling about “human trafficking”, it’s unlikely that anyone would have paid attention. It was Barack Obama who said last year that it was time to call modern slavery by its name. If girls are being forced into domestic service and beaten if they try to leave, it’s slavery. If Lithuanian workers are being kept in debt bondage working on a Kent chicken farm, that’s slavery.

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), on whose advisory board I sit, has compiled a devastating dossier full of such examples. It also took evidence from police and social workers who explained why they lack the basic tools to tackle it. Yes, human trafficking is illegal – but the laws are so fragmented that its victims fall between the gaps. Social workers often have no idea how to recognise, let alone treat, modern-day slaves. It is estimated that local authorities lose track of three in every five who go into their care. The police, the lawyers and the Crown Prosecution Service seem utterly bamboozled.

Take, for example, a case two years ago of an unnamed Vietnamese teenager who was tricked into working in Britain to pay off a loan – and found himself in debt bondage. When he was discovered in a house in Bristol by police on a drugs raid, he explained to officers that he’d been smuggled into Britain in a freezer container, then made to work growing cannabis. He was charged with drug cultivation, sentenced to 12 months and released into local authority care. He promptly vanished, and is assumed to have been taken back into slavery.

European laws are supposed to offer immunity to such victims of trafficking, but the system is hopelessly complex. Another teenager, known to the courts as HVN, was found in a drugs den in Derby two years ago. Neighbours had seen him being carried out by a group of men, with his hands bound. Police found him barefoot and frightened – he had been locked in the house, forced to look after the cannabis. Although the UK Border Agency agreed that he had been trafficked, and should not be prosecuted, their decision did not reach the relevant lawyers, so he was convicted anyway. He was lucky, in that the Court of Appeal overturned the verdict. But the impression was given of a system in chaos, where even the courts are clueless.

In Britain, the police go after the slaves rather than the slave-masters because they are easier to prosecute. One deputy chief constable told the CSJ about a girl who escaped from a brothel, and turned up at a police station. She had no passport. “Under these confusing circumstances, we chose to arrest her for being an illegal immigrant,” he said. Part of the problem is that human trafficking is not a performance indicator for the police. As one law enforcement official put it, there is more incentive to investigate the theft of some tools from a garden shed than a case of human trafficking.

This is why Britain has become the perfect Petri dish for this new evil. We have 1,200 foreigners arriving each day; a capital city where a third of the population are immigrants; and a confused criminal justice system that finds it easiest to go after the victims.

The easiest thing to do is to ignore it. The slaves are in no rush to go to the authorities, given how likely they are to end up in prison or be recycled back into captivity. There is no one really making a fuss. We’re talking about the type of people who only make the news very seldom: usually washed up in Morecambe Bay or found dead in airtight containers in Dover.

Yet Theresa May is a very unusual politician: one that wants to be known by what she does, not what she says. Her Modern Slavery Bill will bring all the various laws together, and ensure that the issue is a top priority for her proposed National Crime Agency, which starts work in October. Catching a human trafficker will be as important as catching an arms dealer, and police will be given clear instructions that the victims are not to be prosecuted. Given the trouble that various parts of government have in talking to each other, Mrs May is even considering the creation of a Commissioner for Modern Day Slavery to make sure her proposals are carried out.

She is also considering a system for companies to declare their goods free of all slave labour. I understand that there is already much interest in this, from retailers who have consumers wondering whether their clothes are cheap because they were made by tiny hands. In an era when we eat prawns from Vietnam, buy gadgets from China and wear underwear from Ecuador, there is a chance that we are buying the goods of modern slavery. By tracking your consumption patterns, the website slaveryfootprint.org can estimate how many slaves work for you. The answer is usually several dozen.

It has taken some time for the nature of the problem to become clear, but it’s one that governments everywhere are now grappling with. But Britain might well become the first major country to undertake a root-and-branch review of modern slavery legislation – creating a template that could be copied the world over. If the police are given the powers they need, and if the evil of slavery is called by its name, then it could represent one of the most consequential of David Cameron’s reforms. It might just be that Britain will lead the world in extinguishing the new slavery, just as it did the old one.